Shabbat Parashat Vayakhel - 5785

Shabbat Parashat Vayakhel - 5785

Rabbi Hal Miller

  Man and woman shall not do more work toward the portion of the Sanctuary. And the nation was held back from bringing. [Shemot 36:6]

Our portion includes repeated references to 'people' doing the 'work' for the Mishkan but it is not always evident to whom or to what those references indicate. For example, in 35:10 the verse says "Every wise-hearted person among you shall come and make", but in 35:30, Betzalel is appointed to do all the work, and in 36:1 it gets explicit that Betzalel and Oholiav and "every wise-hearted person" shall do all the work. Then in 37:1 the Torah begins using "he made" referring to Betzalel. In our verse Moshe tells the people in general to stop doing work, and how the people reacted was to stop bringing materials. So what was the work and who did it?

In 35:32-33 we get some specifics on what the work is: "to make artistic designs, to work with the gold, with the silver and with the copper" "lapidary work for filling and woodcarving, to do every craft". In 35:10 we are given a list of some of the things that God commanded Moshe to make, the tent, the Ark, etc. These are what one usually thinks of when hearing the English word 'work', such as the making of physical things, spinning goat hair [35:25], etc. But it seems that something more is involved than these creative or productive tasks since our verse indicates that everyone was involved in 'work' whether they were in on this list of tasks or not. Are 'bringing' and 'work' equated?

Perhaps the idea of who is doing something helps define what work is. Betzalel is clearly given the responsibility of carrying out the project, and is given the talents and spiritual understanding necessary to accomplish that. From 37:1 and on, the Torah says that "he made", referring to Betzalel, so he must have had hands-on for the things made then, beginning with the Ark. Rav Hirsch explains that up to this point, Betzalel was guiding and teaching other "wise-hearted" people to do the creative work, but with the Ark being the essence of the entire project, Betzalel himself took over. Thus 'work' might seem to be divided into two categories, depending on the importance to the Mishkan, and who does it is divided in the same way.

But some verses, such as 35:21 through 35:29 specify everyone whose heart inspired them, which would appear to be a lower spiritual level than wise-hearted, yet they were doing 'work' as well. It thus seems that there are more than two levels of people involved here, doing varying tasks. In particular, 35:29 says that these people at this lower level were "moved to bring". If this bringing referred to carting materials around the job site, we would acknowledge that as 'work', directly related to the output of the higher-level artisans. But 35:21, 35:22 and our verse seem to imply something different, that people were in fact bringing to the job site various materials from their own possessions as donations. Is donating called 'work'? Sforno says no, that what Moshe is doing in our verse is stopping the donations and saying that at this point it is time to begin the actual work of constructing the product. But this is troubling since the word Moshe used for what he wanted stopped was 'melacha', the same word used throughout the portion that we translate as 'work'.

Ramban gets us around this latter problem. He gives a list of places the Torah uses the word 'melacha' as a reference to some form of property, typically livestock or other item that involves human labor to manage or use. He would presumably then explain our verse, as does Sforno, as a dividing point where the type of melacha changes, but both types are still called work. For Sforno it is bringing and constructing, for Ramban it is the materials themselves and the constructing.

Rav Hirsch also looks at the word melacha, and refers to the laws of Shabbat where it can be defined (among other things) as carrying something from a private domain into a public domain. This approach answers the question about 'bringing', that yes it is work too.

Work, then, is divided into many categories, yet all are called melacha. Those accomplishing this melacha are divided into many categories based on their talents and capabilities, and even moreso on their spiritual levels. What our parsha is teaching us here is that there is equal room for every Jew within the purpose of Judaism, and that each of us must apply our individual capabilities to the mission of the whole.